


The Roads That Lead

by The_RedQueen



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-28
Updated: 2016-05-17
Packaged: 2018-05-09 22:12:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 21,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5557448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_RedQueen/pseuds/The_RedQueen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One night he’s elbows-deep in the sink, sleeves scrunched up around biceps and scrubbing a carafe when the worn brass bell over the door, black with the patina of many years, rings, counterpoint to the quiet chords from the classic jukebox in the corner. A man walks in, soft blue eyes, tan trench coat. He looks very tired and very lost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> For the one whose story I merely gave some shape; I hope I've done it justice.

He inherited it from Bobby—at least, that’s how he phrased it to himself; “bought” sounded too clinical, too commercial, too little for what it meant when the old man passed the rumpled paperwork into his hands with a pointed look from under his dirty trucker’s cap that meant, _Mistreat her and I’ll shoot you dead._ But Dean wasn’t fooled; he’d seen a fond, proud smile attempting to wriggle through the scraggly thatch Bobby called a beard, though both men would be damned before either would have admitted it.

Back then, the place had been called The Roadhouse. It had other names before, but those hadn’t mattered; only The Roadhouse had. It had been a central fixture in Dean’s and Sam’s childhoods, the gravitational point around which the families Winchester and Harvelle, who actually owned the place at the time, orbited.

Dean was seven the first time he visited, during the tail-end of what most assuredly was the Best Day Ever: honored guest of Take Your Child to Work Day. John had toured him around the precinct and allowed him to sit at John’s grown-up desk, took him for a ride in the squad car (yes, complete with sirens), let Dean take his father’s fingerprints, then his own, then make fingerprint art all over spare copy paper, and even let him put the handcuffs on John’s partner, Bill, just as if Bill was one of the bad guys.

A paperwork snafu had left John unable to supervise a wired but hungering Dean (just one of Mary’s PB&J sandwiches soon wouldn’t be enough for the growing boy), and Bill, who was just about done for the day, took custody of Dean and brought him to the bar his wife Ellen owned for a bite to eat and someplace new to visit until John was finished.

And that was how Dean came to The Roadhouse, where Ellen Harvelle always had a basket of chicken fingers ready for him whenever he visited, and two baskets when Sam was old enough to both eat solid food and come along with Dean (when Ellen’s daughter Jo came into their lives, she got her preferred basket of French fries instead).

The Roadhouse, conveniently tucked into a rough and otherwise empty plot just abreast of the off-ramp for Exit 25, was where the Winchesters stopped after church every Sunday for a greasy, homey family lunch with the Harvelles. Where Dean’s Little League team converged after practice. Where Sam did his homework when home was too distracting and the library was crowded. Where the boys and Jo learned how to play Texas Hold ‘Em from Bill, betting with fries. Where the boys watched Jo learn how to bartend, though it’d be years before she would be old enough to do it for pay. Where Dean, during his rebellious streak, would regularly sit in the corner booth, carve his initials into the lacquer of the table with the tip of his penknife, and sneak pilfered cigarettes out back until Ellen caught him one day and drove him back home, two fingers pinched around his ear the whole way. Where Dean caught Sam kissing Jo one morning when they were supposed to be straightening the place up for opening.

(“Yeah, you guys were straightening up _something_ , am I right?”

“What? Oh, God, Dean, _no_! Jesus! We were just kissing!”

“Jo and Sammy sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G—”

“Seriously? What are you, twelve?”

“Nineteen, actually.”

“…what are you, twelve?”)

The Roadhouse was also the first place the Winchesters headed as soon Mary had heard from John over a strained and frantic phone call that Bill had been shot in the line of duty.

Bill hadn’t made it.

By then the childhood glamor of the police force had faded for Dean, grayed out even more by the red puffs of skin around Mary’s bloodshot, crying eyes as she ushered her two boys, near-men now, into her sensible little Accord. For once, Dean didn’t protest about not taking his prize Impala, and Sam, for the first time since he was seven years old, held hands with him in the back of the car.

The Roadhouse had been limping along, thin on staff since Ellen and Jo had left after receiving the call all police wives fear. The place had closed early, but Ash, their student temp worker, couldn’t handle close all by himself, not with the place left in the disarray typical of customers hastily ushered out. So when the Winchester family arrived, silent and somber, Mary only did up her hair with a rubber band fished out from the drawer beneath the register, shoved up her sleeves, and grabbed a broom. Sam fell to wiping the tables—his childhood summer job—and Dean wordlessly polished the bar top, mopped up dribbles of Jack Daniels and vodka, and collected half-crushed lime rinds and mushy cocktail napkins. Once in a while, Dean bumped shoulders with Ash, who was pale beneath the chopped fringe of his mullet and just as subdued as the rest of them.

Dean counted it as a win whenever the bumping turned a little rough and they shoved at each other like ten year old boys on the playground, making Ash crack a very little smile.

At some point, Sam fed a quarter into the jukebox and let Carole King warble out into the wide, dark space of The Roadhouse. The first track he had picked was “You’ve Got a Friend”.

Sam, Dean reasoned, really was always the smart one between the two of them.

They were halfway through “Home Again” before Mary started singing along. By the time “I Feel the Earth Move” queued up, Dean had Mary’s hands in his, shimmying to the hopping piano chords, and Sam and Ash were using the end of a mop handle as a microphone.

It couldn’t have been better timed that John came through the front door just as the song ended. He looked tired, haggard, older than he really was by at least fifteen years and Dean didn’t hold it against his mother that she dropped her son’s hands to go to her husband and wrap her arms around his neck. For his part, John held onto Mary like she was his lifeline, like he couldn’t fathom for one second the possibility of ever letting go.

It was late by then, much later than most of them were used to being awake, but, once Ash had hit the lights and locked the doors and drove off with a grateful kiss to the cheek from Mary, the Winchesters all wordlessly concurred on making the Harvelle house their next stop.

For a week after the funeral, the Winchester brothers would drop by the Roadhouse every night and take up residence in the corner booth for the last hour of Jo’s shifts, which she had stubbornly refused to give up. When she was done, she’d come sit with them, and all three squashed together along the same bench even though Dean really was getting too broad across the shoulders and Sam really was too tall and gangly for all three to fit comfortably. But no one complained and the boys leaned in and sandwiched wiry, fiery Jo between the two of them, silently sharing chicken fingers and sipping sodas for another hour until Jo fidgeted her way out, squeezed both their shoulders, and left for her home without another word.

On the last day of that week, the last day before Dean’s new job at the local mechanic’s started, Sam stole Dean’s penknife right out from his jacket pocket and added his own initials right next to the initials that Dean had carved into the surface years ago. When offered the penknife, Jo didn’t refuse and added a much neater “JBH” to the fresh “SW” and old “DW”.

Jo wasn’t fine after that, not by a long shot, and neither was Ellen, but it was getting better little by little. Whenever Dean happened to come by in the following months to say hello and maybe sip on a still-technically underage beer, he often caught Jo running her fingertips over the scratches in the corner booth table, her sad face warmed a little by a tiny, fond smile.

Ellen started burning out right around then, it seemed, with the strain of grief, both running a business and actually working in her own business a little too much for her. Her presence in The Roadhouse became more occasional as she stepped back to devote more of her time to working on the books, as Dean heard it from Mary, so Ellen hired a few more hands for the manual labor: Dean, for one, and a grizzled widower who’d long frequented The Roadhouse by the name of Bobby Singer.

Dean and Bobby worked most evening shifts together: Bobby in the kitchen, Dean tending bar, to accommodate Bobby’s day job running the local auto scrapyard and Dean’s day job at the mechanic’s. They weren’t chatty; Bobby had always seemed standoffish, and besides, they were _busy_.

But one night proved unusually slow, so, just to fill the odd silence hovering in the wall cutout between the bar and the kitchen, Dean made up some bullshit inquiry about whether or not Bobby had any ’83 Chevelles Dean could cannibalize after a customer had brought their Chevelle in and the mechanic’s shop had been for wanting for parts.

Bobby, it turned out, didn’t have any ’83 Chevelles, but he warmed up considerably when he discovered Dean could talk cars, and conversation came easier after that. On crowded nights they could carry on the same line of conversation for hours, throwing out questions and answers and remarks to each other between Dean’s knack for tossing bottles (he could do it like the professional bartenders he saw on TV once, and it always got him lots of tips…and phone numbers) and the click and clank of Bobby’s knives or the spatula on the grill.

Some evenings John came into The Roadhouse after a shift, bitching about work woes and chuckling with his son about the odd customers who came through the bar. That was how Dean learned that John and Bobby knew each other, sort of, once upon a time, and it had to do with John’s work. Bobby had emerged from the kitchen when he glimpsed John through the cutout and the two older men had shared arm clasps and back-pounding hugs like old war buddies. Dean didn’t find out how exactly they knew each other until a late, painful close the anniversary night of Bill Harvelle’s death, three years from the day.

Ellen hadn’t been seen the whole night and Jo had taken off early, leaving Dean and Bobby to handle closing. They swapped stories and fed quarters into the jukebox; Bobby wasn’t feeling picky, so Dean chose the tunes for the night and, in an unusual fit of sentiment, played Carole King again. So sue him: Sammy was already in his third year of undergrad at Stanford, but Dean never stopped missing his little brother.

Dean was halfway done with cleaning the tabletops when Bobby slammed two shot glasses down on the bar, poured them each some Jack, and asked what the hell a bright kid like Dean was still doing in a town like this, working double-time as a mechanic and a bartender.

The answer was easy: he liked working with his hands, he didn’t mind getting dirty, and when Sammy applied for colleges, Dean sprang for The Roadhouse job to help pay his little brother’s way (he sniggered as he recounted the tears on Sammy’s face when Dean handed over the savings account he had scraped together for Stanford on Sam’s graduation day). And besides, college didn’t sound like his thing; college was for the smart kids.

(“No, really, Bobby, the really smart kids who actually gave a flying fuck about high school.”

“It’s high school, Dean, no one gives a fuck about it, let alone a flying one, after you graduate.”)

Those kids would amount to better than the oily, dirty auto-mechanic sons of police officers. He was a grunt, not much else. He could be okay with that.

Bobby grunted, considered, and talked about Karen then, beautiful, blonde Karen who looked about to kick some serious ass the day she and Bobby had argued about children and how Bobby had been sure that all he’d do was break every single thing he touched. No kids, Bobby said, and Karen had been devastated.

Three days later, Bobby had returned home to discover his wife stabbed to death in their kitchen. Home invasion, was what the police surmised, what John Winchester had said, when he had introduced himself to Bobby as the detective in charge of the Singer stabbing. _We’ll get the bastard_ , John had promised, _Whoever it is, we’ll get ‘em._

The murderer was a drifter, some stranger who faked lost and got beautiful, kind Karen to invite him into their home just so he could make away with some easy steals. Up and down the guy had sworn in his confession that he hadn’t really planned to kill Karen, just grab some family silver or something and skedaddle when she left him alone for long enough. But he had gotten cocksure and rifled through her purse while she was still in the room, back turned to him, and she saw the reflection in the side of the metal toaster. Panicking as Karen screamed bloody murder, afraid she’d run out into the street and call for help or get to the phone for 911, he’d grabbed up a kitchen knife she’d left on the sideboard and, well…

Point was, Bobby had told Dean after his third shot, the senseless randomness of his wife’s murder all those years ago he could get over, the unholy horror of returning home expecting love and finding gore, he could forget…but the three days of awkward skirting and hurt silence after their argument, of knowing she’d loved him enough to want his kids and the fact that he’d been too afraid of himself, hadn’t valued himself enough to believe her when she had said he’d be a good father, a great father, three days of pain instead of three days of appreciation for having each other…that, he’d never gotten over. They had never gotten past that argument. He couldn’t even remember if he’d told Karen he loved her in those three days.

Point was, Bobby had said as Dean somberly stared down into his empty glass, that convincing yourself that things have to be a certain way didn’t mean you’d saved yourself pain…just meant you’d lose yourself happiness.

“You’re no grunt, Dean,” Bobby declared, “You don’t gotta settle for what you have if you think for even a second you could do better by you.”

“Nah, Bobby. I’m good here, really.”

Bobby’s eyebrows had shot up his forehead so far they seemed in danger of disappearing under his ratty trucker’s cap. _Bullshit,_ that look said.

“ _Could_ , Dean, I heard ya. Not _are_. _Could_ be okay with…that,” he drawled, gesturing vaguely to the whole of Dean’s personhood. “Not are. Sounds like a _not really_ okay with it to me,” he’d added, just to be a prick. Dean laughed.

They each drank one more shot to Bill Harvelle’s memory afterwards, finished up, and went their separate ways, but this time, Bobby had a warm goodbye clap-on-the-shoulder for Dean. Dean piled himself into the Impala without turning her engine over, listening as Bobby’s old clanking pickup trundled off the property onto the highway on-ramp.

The next day, Dean had called up Sammy to ask if he maybe had some spare space in that fancy California apartment of his. Dean swore he could hear Sam’s mile-wide grin through the phone after that.

As much as he tried to forestall it, Dean’s near and extended family sent him off with as much fanfare as they could manage. Mary held a kind of bon voyage barbecue and Ellen shanghaied some of the guys John invited from the station into helping her cook because _Ain’t nobody was going to get fed who wasn’t going to move their asses to help make it_.

Jo congratulated Dean on getting out of their little town, then punched him so hard he got bruises as recompense for leaving her now without either of her big brothers.

(“Eww, Jo, didn’t know you were into that incest thing.”

“Oh. My. GOD. Dean. I was like…thirteen, okay? And Sam and I only ever kissed the once. _Clearly_ we decided we were better off _not_ dating each other.”

“Whatever you say to help yourself sleep at night, Joanna Beth.”

“Call me that again and I’ll mail you your balls as a housewarming present when you get to Stanford. I’ll even spring for priority shipping.”)

But Jo did at least have a fond peck for Dean the day he finally tossed his worldly possessions into the Impala and moved out of his childhood home and town. Mary cried as hard as she did the day Sam flew out to California three years ago, and while John remained steadfastly dry-eyed, he’d had to clear his throat a couple times before he gruffly reminded Dean to look after the Impala (not that Dean had to be told twice). Ellen held him so long and hard Dean thought his lungs forgot how to function and even Bobby was there, pleased on his behalf but unsurprised at his departure.

His last memory of home for a while would be the image of his family in the Impala’s rearview mirror waving goodbye from the Winchesters’ driveway.

Having already secured himself admission at a small local college, Dean began classes for an associate’s degree in business shortly after he settled in with Sam…and the first day, he was late because out of all the things he remembered to sort out before his return to academia, what he didn’t remember was to do the laundry that had been piling up since his move-in, finding Dean without a clean pair of boxers forty-two minutes before he had to have his ass in his classroom seat.

It took him fifty-eight minutes to trash his room looking for a clean pair that may have hidden itself away in the clutter, debate on the merits of just wearing a pair from the laundry, determine if he could afford the humiliation of asking his kid brother to borrow a pair of his own boxers, suck up his pride and ask, pull on clothes, scarf down a piece of toast, drive to campus, park, and find the proper building.

It was a pretty inauspicious start, but things fortunately ran pretty smoothly after that.

Sam’s girlfriend Jess (“Damn, Sam, you really know how to draft out of your own league!”) held a part-time job at a boutique close to Dean’s campus, so she often met him for lunch at a nearby coffee shop when their schedules matched up. It was only awkward the first couple of times, since Jess was clearly eager to get to know the older brother Sam near-idolized while Dean had known next to nothing about her very existence until he’d relocated to California.

It got much less awkward after Dean and Jess somehow got themselves into a harmless flirt-off just to see who could get the charming barista’s phone number first one Wednesday afternoon (Jess won, though Dean grumbled about it being impossible for him to know that the lovely Charlie only batted for the girls’ team since Jess had been a regular at the shop long before Dean came to town.)

(Dean later howled his indignation and challenged Jess to hand-to-hand combat in Super Smash Bros Melee when he found out that Charlie was actually her roommate and that they had played him like a cheap fiddle. In the middle of the following button-mashing fight to the death, Sam despaired quietly to himself in the kitchen as he grabbed them all beers that the two people he loved most in the world making friends with each other meant that he was doomed to a lifetime of never-ending pranks, probably.)

Dean had always been a coffee drinker, but it was Jess who introduced him to espresso a month and a half after Dean had come to the West Coast. Hanging out at the coffee shop was a bonding experience for them; outside of family, Jess became Dean’s first real friend and Charlie followed soon after (as an apology for the trick she and Jess had played on Dean, she’d doodled herself as slave Leia fawning over Dean as Han Solo on his coffee cup one day and announced his name as such when she’d finished his order).

It was halfway through a cappuccino with the girls, with a rare midday appearance from Sam, when Dean realized he was actually, for once, content with where he was.

He was drinking a red-eye studying late one night when Charlie called him crying because she’d caught her girlfriend cheating. Jess and Sam were away visiting Jess’ family for the weekend, so Dean had gone to fetch Charlie and they platonically cuddled together while they watched the second Lord of the Rings (and they vowed to take the fact that they both cried during Samwise Gamgee’s speech to their graves).

In the middle of a wary sample sip from Sam’s frou-frou half-caf skinny caramel-with-one-pump-vanilla-whatever-the-hell latte drink, Dean choked from surprised happiness when Sam shyly admitted that he probably wanted to marry Jess one day.

Struck dumb by infatuation, Dean fumbled his way through his date with a pretty girl named Cassie before she informed him through her giggles that he had foam from his Italian-style macchiato still residing across his upper lip.

Sam brought him a double espresso to wake him up following the hangover following the night that Cassie dumped him after nearly six months of dating.

Jess allowed Dean to split a breve with her the afternoon he groveled on behalf of Sam to please just let his pathetic, mopey kid brother out of the doghouse because Sam really, really was just obscenely unbearable and sad and also he keeps playing your favorite songs in the apartment and you know he probably loves you more than me anyways.

Grinning to himself later that evening as he made himself scarce when Jess had come over in tears to forgive Sam for being a total idiot, Dean congratulated himself on being an awesome brother and celebrated by curling up in the coffee shop with Vonnegut and a café Cubano he taught and convinced the barista to make for him.

Dean thought he had heard a song about something like this…measuring life by cups of coffee. Or measuring years. Or something. There was something comforting about coffee shops, places he’d never had reason to frequent back at home, something welcoming in the coffee smell and the murmur of the café-goers and the easy familiarity of the baristas who knew his name by now…even if they did usually play weird hipster-indie-pop shit for ambience. But he always made up for it with drives in his baby by cranking his Led Zeppelin cassette up as high as he could stand it.

Altogether it seemed like all he’d had to do was blink and suddenly he was holding his associate’s, and Sam was finishing his first year of law school and Jess had a ring on her finger and Charlie already had a cushy programmer’s job waiting for her in Silicon Valley and they were celebrating, drinking, laughing and…and…

“Now what, Dean?” Sam asked around his broad, proud grin, his ever-growing lion’s mane drifting in the breeze blowing through the restaurant’s outdoor patio. His hand and Jess’s seemed perpetually linked together now and Charlie good-naturedly had her arm looped through Dean’s so he wouldn’t feel left out. He stalled by lifting the bottle of beer to his lips and thought…

…now what?

 _Now what?_ Dean pondered some more as he climbed into bed that night. Getting a higher education was usually everybody’s Holy Grail it seemed while growing up, and he’d done it, right? He’d proven to himself that he could do it…that Bobby was right, that he wasn’t just a grunt, the blue-collar son of a blue-collar man. Not that there was anything wrong with that, of course not, but Bobby had been right about other things all along…Dean really did have more potential than he had ever given himself credit for.

But now that he knew it, what was he going to _do_ about it?

“I’m going on a road trip,” Dean announced the next morning at breakfast. Sam spat out his orange juice and Jess dropped her fork.

After some explaining, they were brought around to see it Dean’s way. With everything he learned for his shiny new degree, he was going to open a business. He needed money for capital, but he didn’t quite want to settle somewhere yet…not like he had any particular place in mind anyhow.

For his part, Sam didn’t protest too much; he knew his older brother, and he understood that Dean never came here with the intention of staying in Palo Alto. Sam understood quite well also that Dean perhaps didn’t really know what he wanted to do and that he needed space to figure it out and be productive while he was at it, save up some money as he bided time until inspiration struck him or whatever.

The day that Dean climbed into his precious Impala and drove away from the apartment for the last time, Sam thought about the little bank account that held nearly all of Dean’s savings from the various odd jobs he had worked since barely graduating high school, the bank account that Dean had himself put together, helping to pay for a good chunk of Sam’s undergraduate tuition. Back on his own high school graduation day, still capped and gowned and holding the account papers with tears in his eyes as Dean smirked and tried to be macho about everything, Sam could tell already that Dean may never figure out precisely what he wanted to do with his life but knew exactly what he wanted to accomplish with it.

And Sam knew too that those two really aren’t the same thing, when it comes down to it.

So, as he watched Dean drive away and kept his arm firmly tucked around a sniffling Jess, Sam covered over just how deeply he’d miss his brother with the happy knowledge that, for once, Dean had finally decided to invest in himself.

 

Being away from his family, both the one back in his hometown and the one he’d just left in Palo Alto, opened up what felt like the next Marianas Trench in Dean. Family was everything, and despite how casual and excited he had made himself seem to be around Sam and Jess and Charlie, Dean actually thought more often than he’d cared to admit that maybe he should just turn around.

But Dean couldn’t deny to himself that drifting across the continent was exhilarating, just him and his baby purring and tearing over open blacktop under dusky skies and below mountain crags so high and sharp they looked like they were going to tear Heaven open, tumbling angels down on unsuspecting humanity below.

Dean laughed aloud as he raced along one such ridge, recalling his mother’s adage about angels always watching over them.

He drifted and saved, taking on jobs that struck his fancy and falling back on his penchant for auto mechanics if there was nothing else. The apartments he leased were cheap and shitty, but that just made work more appealing to report to instead of less, and at the end of the day, he still had a comfortable sum in his bank account and so he couldn’t complain.

Six years later, the Impala at long last rolled into the Winchesters’ driveway and, like any policeman’s wife worth her salt, Mary Winchester almost brained her own son with a weighted table lamp as he stumbled through the door.

(“ _Dean!_ Oh my God, Dean, honey!”

“Hey, mom…I think you took some years off my life.”

“I’m so _sorry_ , you didn’t call out, all I heard was a car, and then the door was opening, and your father’s working late—”

“It’s okay, really. I have fast reflexes. No harm, no foul, honest.”)

After Mary cried her way through hugging her son to death, she called John, who came racing home and stopped by the Harvelles’ on the way.

A lot happens in eight years, Dean decided when he saw Bobby and Ellen emerge from the same car, and Jo had somehow grown up a complete knockout— _jeez, when did that happen?_ —but the open hole in his chest started filling with every person who walked through the door. It felt like he was once again gathering all the correct bits and pieces of himself as everyone sat up and talked and drank late into the night. Mary unearthed a chocolate cake from somewhere and John had plenty of whiskey in the house, Ellen was smiling, her hand clasped in Bobby’s, like Dean hadn’t seen since Bill died, and Jo had cuddled herself into Dean’s side, swilling whiskey shot for shot with John.

For a while, Dean let himself hurt at the fact that Sam and Jess and even Charlie couldn’t be here either to complete the picture, but then he packed it away and let himself enjoy the evening. At some point hours later, John and Mary retired and Jo had fallen asleep, mouth hanging open unattractively. An easy silence had fallen between Dean and Bobby as, with a knowing look, Ellen stood, stretched, and gathered up the cutlery and plates and glasses to take into the kitchen.

Dean and Bobby talked after that, both men dancing around touchy-feely words like “Thank you for convincing me that I was worth something,” and “I’m proud of you.” But Bobby did clear his throat and ask Dean what he thought about owning his own business, and somehow all the pieces Dean had been amassing all evening seemed to suddenly fall and click into place.

It had been the right time to come home after all.

 

He inherited it from Bobby on a Thursday afternoon. The Roadhouse by now had had its doors closed for weeks and they were getting ready to sell; time to move on, Ellen had said when Dean had asked her about it later, after that first conversation with Bobby at his homecoming.

“Sweetheart, we’re all of us growing up,” she told him in the Winchesters’ kitchen one morning Mary had insisted that Bobby and the Harvelle women join them for breakfast. “We loved The Roadhouse, it wasn’t no hardship, you know that, not even after Bill went. But some things just gotta go.” She spun to face Dean, hands still damp from washing dishes, and held her hand against his jaw like she was his own mother, looking at him from under her eyebrows.

“Some things just gotta go, even if they don’t really have to, even if you loved them, because it’s just time for them to,” Ellen continued, and Dean got the distinct impression that she wasn’t just talking about The Roadhouse.

A week later, Dean stood in the patchy grass just off Exit 25 and watched as the battered insides of The Roadhouse from his childhood got torn out to make room for the new life he was going to breathe into an old building.

Dean breathed himself and grinned, raising his face to the morning sun. Despite the dust kicked up by the equipment, he felt clean.


	2. The Highway Café

Back then, the place had been called The Roadhouse; now it’s known as The Highway Café, in keeping with the travel theme. Kitschy, sure, Dean would be the first to admit that, but he kind of likes it that way. Simple. Unpretentious. Uncomplicated.

He’s happy with what he’d done on the insides too. Gone were the dark, worn floorboards and sticky, black-lacquered tables, the scratched-up bar, the faux-Tiffany style ceiling lamps and the cracking vinyl booth seats. He’d modeled the renovations after a place where he’d worked for a few months somewhere in Oregon: open floorplan with the counter to the left and a wide, yawning stone hearth to the right, mismatched tables and chairs scattered in between, and a bar set across the back wall for the sugar packets and cup cozies and stirring sticks.

Most of the woodwork he’d had to contract, but some of the details he’d carved and finished himself: most of the tables, a few of the chairs, the molding edging the countertops, and the condiment bar, which he’d made out of a split tree trunk he’d personally chosen from a lumberyard, sanded across the top until it was so smooth the pattern of the woodgrain flowed like marble.

The place and its décor are simple, modest… _solid_ , is the word Dean likes to use. Solid like the wood in its construction, solid like Dean himself…solid and safe as houses.

Dean supposes that’s what he feels in the Café: safe. He had worked for it. He had built it, almost literally. It is his, every piece of it, even if the building had been the Harvelles’ first…but that was when it had been The Roadhouse.

It’s The Highway Café now. Sometimes people talk about it as _Dean’s_ Highway Café, a name he’d heard bandied about town now and again, and damn if that hadn’t made him feel proud. But whatever the place is called, _this_ would always be his; he doesn’t need his name in the sign over the front door to know that.

 

One Friday night, the Café is particularly quiet in a way that it hasn’t been since Dean first opened its doors a couple years ago. There’s still an hour to go until close, but there isn’t a customer in sight. Dean can’t exactly say it’s an unwelcome change; the last couple of weeks have been crazy with Christmas on the horizon, and he’s not about to look a gift horse in the mouth…even if it’s only an evening’s respite from the usual holiday travelers’ traffic.

Tonight, he’s elbows-deep in the sink, sleeves scrunched up around biceps and scrubbing a carafe when the worn brass bell over the door, black with the patina of many years, rings, counterpoint to the quiet chords from the classic jukebox in the corner. A man walks in: soft blue eyes, tan trench coat. He looks very tired and very lost.

Dean’s mouth downturns in sympathy; the guy looks like he’s had a long day, if the rumpled coat is any indication. Even the suit he’s wearing under it is looking a bit worn out. He’s steady on his feet but stiff in the shoulders, somehow tense, and a tiny crease between his eyebrows is wearing into a furrow. It looks like he isn’t quite sure how he got here.

“I’ll be right with you if you wait a second,” Dean calls as he begins rinsing the carafe. He gets an acquiescent hum in return, a soft concession floating across the room over the rush of water insisting that, no, it’s all right if they’re already closed. Dean’s eyes flick to the wall clock, a cheesy tin coffee cup (a present from Sam), and replies, “No. Just cleaning up. Not closed quite yet.”

He feels more than hears the legs of a barstool on the other side of the counter scrape against the floor as the man slides himself into it with a heavy sigh of exhaustion. So…a _really_ long day, then. Dean mentally makes a bet with himself that the guy probably has some family he’s on his way to visit and he’s not all that enthused. Either that or car trouble.

“You doing okay, man?” Dean asks, glancing up from the sink.

The man’s eyes are drifting around the space, taking it all in. The glances seem a little critical, calculating, but the stranger is nothing but polite when he answers with a voice like gravel, “Yes. Just…I have been busy.”

 _Haven’t we all_ , Dean thinks, but he shuts the faucet off, sets the carafe to dry, and asks aloud, “Holiday rush getting you down, yeah?”

“Not particularly, per se,” is the odd reply as the man curves his shoulders forward and lays his hands primly in his lap. Dean is somehow reminded of a bird folding itself up in its roost for the night.

“Well, then,” Dean says to break the conversational dead-end, “what can I do you for?”

“Tea, if you have it.”

Dean can’t hide the grimace twisting across his face. His specialty is coffee and espresso, and honestly if Sam hadn’t lobbied for its inclusion, tea probably would have never crossed his mind at all. Point is, Dean doesn’t know tea; best he can do is the mediocre-brand bagged stuff in two flavors: green or black.

It’s a little mortifying to have what he knows are crap offerings for tea when he prides himself on the coffee roasted only in-house by yours truly, but it’s not exactly like he’s had the time to teach himself anything about it. Like, go on a tea pilgrimage or something.

Is that even a thing? Tea pilgrimage?

Preemptively, defensively, Dean crosses his arms over his chest. “Uh, um, just so you know, I’ve only got…uh, the bagged tea. In case you were looking for something fancier. Mine’s not that fancy,” he burbles, brain still half-stuck on the idea of tea pilgrimages. The man across the counter tilts his head very slightly, gaze honing in on Dean, and he blinks long and slow.

“That is acceptable,” he replies, and Dean internally sighs in relief, posture relaxing. The guy didn’t sound all that put-out; it may be a fact of life in the food service business that you will disappoint some customers, but Dean never likes it when it happens. He likes it much less when the customers get all up in his face about it.

“Coming right up.” Dean busies himself with filling and starting the electric kettle as the trench coated man plucks a slightly sticky menu from the sheaf of them squeezed behind the espresso machine.

“I do not like coffee,” the stranger announces as Dean is retrieving his green tea box and his black tea box from their shelf. “I find it…harsh. Bitter.”

“So you…come to a coffee shop?”

“I enjoy the scent of it. It’s very warm.”

“Just not the taste?”

“No,” the man confirms, his mouth tightening slightly as he squints at the laminated paper in his hands. Dean wonders whether the guy’s far-sighted and forgot his glasses or if he is just naturally suspicious of espresso. Then the man continues, “I don’t enjoy the taste. I much prefer tea.”

He breaks his staring contest with the menu when Dean plunks the boxes down almost under his nose, gesturing for him to choose.

“Maybe you picked the wrong place then, man,” Dean chortles, leaning over the counter on the heels of his hands with a cheeky grin.

Humor shifts to fascination as Dean watches the stranger pick up each box in turn, tumbling it over and over in his hands. The man opens each and peers inside, squinting again, sniffing delicately. Then he sets the boxes back down on the countertop abreast of each other, squares their corners carefully, and very gently slides one of them forward toward Dean with two fingers touched to the box’s edge. He’d gone with the green tea.

“No,” the tired man in the trench coat replies with an oddly serene little smile, “I think I picked just the right one.”

His words send a bit of a shiver up Dean’s spine that has nothing to do with the fat snowflakes he can see out the windows, so naturally Dean completely ignores it and carries on with getting the tea prepared.

The man pipes up, “What do I owe you?”

Dean shakes his head, scoffing, “For the tea? On the house. Seriously. This late, this cold, it’s the least I can do…looks like you got some serious driving ahead of you still. Won’t take no for an answer,” he adds with a little jab of the unwrapped tea bag in the stranger’s direction. It swings wildly through the air and the bemused look on the stranger’s face is enough thanks. Insides humming with satisfaction, Dean turns away again.

For a moment, comfortable silence reigns.

“You look a little lost,” Dean prompts to fill the space between them. The man gives a noncommittal hum in response, its timbre so deep it sounds like a rumble.

“It’s my first free night on Earth in a while,” he says. Back turned, Dean frowns at the mug he’d just pulled from its hanging hook underneath the cabinet. The wording was bizarre, but the guy’s probably just being melodramatic about his free time. Or maybe he just got out of prison.

Whatever, Dean isn’t one to judge. The guy doesn’t look like he could hurt a fly let alone do anything bad enough to warrant jail. Unless he was in for tax evasion…that would explain the tax accountant getup.

Dean slides the tea in front of the ex-con/accountant, and hedges, “Where do you work? Bummer they’d keep you so late, and especially at the start of the weekend.” Dean looks over the counter at the stranger, who curls his fingers gratefully around the hot drink and hunches up over it to catch the steam.

“I…protect people, at my Lord’s request. It is very time-consuming, as the world is apparently full of people looking to hurt others,” he says almost into the mug, forehead crinkling just so in consternation. The ensuing silence is punctuated by quick little slurpy sips the man takes, avoiding burning his tongue.

Well then. So maybe this dude is just…really, really tired and isn’t quite aware of how he sounds. Or maybe this guy’s boss is a basket case who insists on being called “my lord.”

“Sounds, um, rough,” Dean recovers eventually, turning away to tend to the drip brewers. “To, uh…have to take care of that sort of thing. Makes running this place sound like a walk in the park.”

“You have your duties and I have mine,” the man responds mildly. “We all have our roles. Not a one of us is more or less important than another.” He pauses, reconsidering. “But you are correct,” he concedes with a bit of humor in his eyes. “It…it is _rough_ , as you say. Sometimes.”

Dean chuckles without otherwise responding. By now it really is nearing close, and unless he wants to get home past midnight, he has to start the closing chores now.

He’s accepted that he won’t be able to get a read on this guy, but Dean knows a good man when he sees one, and this man…whatever his deal is, whatever he’s doing here at almost eleven on a Friday night two weeks out from Christmas, he’s all right.

The returning silence as Dean wipes down the counters, scrubs out the espresso machine heads, and collects scraps of napkins and sugar packets is amiable. Neither speaks; the man in the trench coat continues drinking, sedate, and Dean sweeps to the sound of Stevie Nicks coming through the jukebox. That was one thing, along with the old brass door bell, that Dean had saved from The Roadhouse.

Dean is almost finished flipping the chairs up atop the tables when he breaks the quiet with, “Hey, man, I hope things ease up a bit on you, especially this close to Christmas.” At the next table over, the man is also flipping chairs, his empty mug abandoned on the counter. When Dean speaks, he smiles, and despite the clear fatigue, his face is soft and content.

“Thank you,” the stranger replies, straightening out the table, chairs and all. “This is a very…nice establishment. I haven’t encountered anything much like it in my travels on Earth.” Then the man pauses, a wry quirk pulling at the corners of his mouth. “Although your tea could use some help. Maybe I will bring you some. There is a second flush Darjeeling from Kalimpong that I am rather fond of.”

“Whoa there,” Dean jokes as he brushes his palms off on his apron. “Them’s fighting words.” For a second the man looks a little perplexed, but the moment passes and he opens his mouth to speak.

“I—” he begins, but then his eyes cloud and he cocks his head, ear angled toward the ceiling. Instinctually, Dean looks up, but nothing’s amiss.

The man shakes himself out of his distraction. “I must be going,” he apologizes, suddenly gruff. “Thank you very much for your hospitality…friend,” he adds, as if trying the word on his tongue for the first time.

Dean extends a hand. “It’s Dean, and you’re welcome any time. I was about to have to kick you out anyways. I’m almost done here.” The stranger glances back and forth between Dean’s face and Dean’s fingers, seemingly baffled, but he grasps the proffered hand. His grip is firm and sure, despite his confusion.

“Castiel,” the stranger returns. He lets go and twists neatly on his heel, making a beeline for the door.

“Safe travels, Cas, and drive safely. I hear there’s supposed to be an ice storm or blizzard or something tonight,” Dean calls, returning to the last of the chairs as the brass bell clanks overhead. Castiel— _what a weird name_ , he thinks—looked in such a rush to leave that Dean wasn’t sure he’d heard.

Just as he’s ready to head out himself, Dean remembers the tea mug on the countertop, forgotten and still unwashed. But when he backtracks to take care of it, it’s gone, the spotless mug returned to its hook under the cabinet.

“Huh,” Dean murmurs. He must have taken care of it already, which wouldn’t be a surprise; the upkeep of the Café comes so automatically these days he can’t remember sometimes which tasks he’d already accomplished.

Just to be safe, Dean wraps closing by double checking that the shop chores have all been completed. Everything, thankfully, checks out, so he lets his mind wander, mulling over the conversation he’d had with the stranger—with Castiel—that evening as he locks the front door behind him.

 _Strange guy,_ Dean thinks, tightening the lapels of his coat around his neck as he huddles protected from the snow in the Café’s doorway. Castiel had seemed so friendly and then suddenly so distant…distracted, maybe, was the better word. And the way he spoke? Strange didn’t seem to cover it. But Dean, at least, is sure: for all his quirks, Cas is all right.

Dean crunches his way through the icing-thick layer of snow in the parking lot to the Impala, stretching underneath her own fluffy blanket like a languid, 275 horsepower panther. The sight of her still makes Dean’s heart soar and he momentarily forgets about his odd customer as the enticingly near reward of home and warmth and his own bed takes precedence.

It’s just as Dean is fitting the Impala’s key into the lock that he realizes he’d never heard Castiel’s car pull in or out of the parking lot. He knows cars, he knows which sounds which engines make; he’s even made it a game with himself to identify the cars of his incoming customers and ask them blithely about their vehicle as they order their drinks. Maybe Castiel drives one of those ridiculous little hybrids. Hopefully not; Cas seemed like a cool guy and Dean doesn’t want to have to hate him on principle. And besides, with the snow and maybe a blizzard on the way, no way in hell would a dinky Prius or whatever it is make it through _that_.

Dean isn’t the praying type, but as he chafes his fingers to warmth sitting in the driver’s seat, he sends some good intentions out into the universe and hopes Cas makes it to his destination safely.

He has a little bit of a hard time guiding the low chassis of the Impala over the gathering layers of snow as she meanders out onto the highway ramp. For the split second before his attention is occupied by navigating carefully back home, it occurs to him that the wheels of Cas’ car should have left furrows in the snow for him to follow.

 

“I’m telling you, Sammy,” Dean says, “Just try it. Just once.” He pauses halfway through cutting open a sealed bag of espresso beans. “No, no. Seriously. _Changed_ my life, scout’s honor.”

The sound of the brass bell out front echoes through the doorway of the storeroom.

“Sorry, Sam, I gotta go. Duty calls.” Dean hefts the bag against his ribcage and pauses just a second more. “Yeah. Yeah, you too. Call when you takeoff, I’ll pick you guys up. Love to Jess. ‘Kay. Bye.”

He slips his phone into the pocket of his apron just as he passes from the storeroom to the front of the house. It’s a quiet night again and no one’s been in for the last half-hour; by now, Dean’s chalked it up to the unusual amount of snow the area’s been getting this year. Nobody he knew would go out of their way to drive through the snow and ice for a coffee fix this late at night.

Nobody except the guy standing in the corner hovering over the jukebox, maybe.

“Sorry, man, I was in the middle of something,” Dean apologizes, shaking the espresso bean bag a little to emphasize the point. Because he absolutely was not spending business hours casually chatting on his cell phone to his kid brother. Nope.

Ah, what the hell, it’s his coffee shop anyways, he can do what he wants.

The man straightens up, revealing a familiar worn face and mussed dark hair, blue eyes.

 _Castiel_ , Dean’s mind helpfully supplies, and he can’t help but grin.

“Castiel, right?” Dean sets the bag down and wends his way around the counter. “Hey, good to see you! Was a little worried the other night, it was snowing so hard—”

“What is this?” Castiel interrupts, pointing at the jukebox.

The non-sequitur throws Dean for a loop and he stops halfway to reaching out for a friendly clap on the shoulder. “What…what?” he very eloquently replies. Castiel grabs Dean by the sleeve and tugs him closer, gesturing to the jukebox.

“This,” Castiel repeats, jabbing his finger at the glass front and indicating one of the nameplates within.

“Uh…Guns N’ Roses,” Dean reads out. Castiel looks rather unimpressed.

“I can read,” he replies, “But what does it mean?”

“You don’t know Guns N’ Roses?”

Castiel levels a look at Dean that says, _Why do you think I’m asking?_

Dean holds out a hand— _wait here_ —and heads to the tip jar at the counter for a quarter, which he slots into the jukebox when he returns. He pulls up “Paradise City” and both men watch as the vinyl flips down onto the turntable inside.

“So Guns N’ Roses…” prompts Castiel, still a little lost, and Dean vaguely waves his hand as he winds back through the tables back behind the counter.

“The band,” he calls in answer. He can tell by the susurrus of fabric that Castiel is following him through the shop and he reaches up into the cabinet automatically for the boxes of cheap tea.

When Dean spins back around, boxes in hand, he’s confronted by a plain aluminum tin pinched between Castiel’s fingers.

“Uh,” Dean begins, still struggling to get his eyes to focus on the item held a little too close to his face. Castiel gives the tin a little shake and its contents shuffle inside.

“Tea,” Castiel explains, as if that explains anything at all. Dean sets down his tea boxes and accepts the tin, shaking it a little himself.

“What is this?” he asks, popping the lid. He sticks his nose in and inhales, almost choking on the unexpected richness of the smell: dark, earthy, and yet, somehow crisp.

“The Darjeeling,” continues Castiel. “I said I would bring you some.” His face scrunches, as if in a little bit of pain. “Your tea stock, as I said, leaves rather a bit to be desired.”

Dean pulls his face away from the tin, huffing to clear his nose of the scent, and chuckles. “You did say that. Thanks. You didn’t have to.”

“I believe I just did.” Castiel smiles, small and pleasant and pleased.

Dean turns the tin over in his hands; he’s reminded of the first night Castiel visited and how he tumbled the boxed tea in his fingers, carefully considering.

“I suppose you’d like some of it,” Dean offers, turning away toward the mugs. “Can’t say I know how to make the loose tea stuff, so you’ll probably have to school me on it.”

“It was a gift to you. You don’t need to offer me what is yours,” replies Castiel, but he circles around the counter to where the pass-through is anyway. “May I?” he asks, gesturing.

“Yeah, yeah, feel free.” Dean beckons him over. “As you can tell, we’re extremely busy tonight,” he laughs.

Castiel pauses in the middle of smoothing down his trench coat, which had snagged on the corner of the counter. “We’re the only ones here,” he responds, concerned, side-eyeing Dean.

On his part, Dean rolls his eyes and gets the kettle going. “Sarcasm, man, sarcasm.”

Castiel blinks once, twice, and then vague understanding dawns. Dean laughs again and claps a sympathetic hand to Castiel’s shoulder—everyone’s taken their turn as the slow guy at one point or another—and then opens the tin again.

The smell wafting up from within is beginning to grow on him.

“Tell me how I do this,” Dean asks, stepping away and gesturing to the tin. “Don’t want to screw it up.”

Wordlessly Castiel slides into the space and reaches for what he needs: a measuring spoon, a basket coffee filter. He doesn’t ask where to find these things and he doesn’t seem to need to; Dean figures Castiel probably comes in fairly regularly, then, just when Dean happens to be off-shift, and has been pretty observant of the baristas behind the counter.

“You called me something last we met,” Castiel murmurs above the burble of the water in the kettle and the last few screeches of Axl Rose. “It wasn’t my name.”

Dean, watching as Castiel spoons a teaspoon of tea into the basket filter, backtracks to the first time they’d met. What was it he’d said?

Oh yeah.

“What, ‘Cas?’” Dean replies. Castiel puts down the teaspoon, meets Dean’s eyes, and waits. He doesn’t seem offended, just…expectant.

Dean slowly realizes that this is what it must feel like to truly have all of someone’s attention. He clears his throat to cover his sudden nerves and upturns the corner of his mouth in a cocky grin, shrugging one shoulder in a lazy show of nonchalance.

“Yeah, Castiel’s just…a mouthful to say. The nickname just kinda…came out. Seemed natural,” Dean says. He shoves his hands down into the pockets of his apron. “I can call you Castiel, if you don’t like that?” he tentatively offers.

Castiel returns his attention to the tea, this time reaching out for a second mug. “I do like it,” he replies, and there’s a bit of a smile in his voice. Dean exhales a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. “That isn’t it at all, Dean. It’s just…I have never been given a nickname before. It’s…pleasant.”

“So, Cas it is, then?”

“I like Cas,” Cas says. He turns—there’s the smile—and offers a mug with a little bobbing bundle of twisted-up coffee filter. Dean blinks. He must have missed Castiel going for the kettle.

“You have no loose tea bags,” Cas apologizes as Dean takes the proffered mug, “I had to improvise.” He nods at the coffee filter of tea leaves floating in the mug. “Let that steep for three to five minutes.”

“Then we can drink it?”

“Then we drink,” Castiel confirms. Dean holds his mug up and, when no reaction seems forthcoming, he pushes it forward just a little bit more and taps it against the lip of Castiel’s mug in a toast.

They wait four minutes. Dean’s not convinced on Darjeeling yet, but he suspects it’ll grow on him too.

 

Cas is staring at him across the lip of the little iron tea bowls he’d brought with him this time. Dean schools his features into something more neutral and takes another sip.

“Well?” Cas asks. Dean breathes and sets the bowl down with a heavy clunk onto the counter.

“I don’t think this particular…what the hell did you call it?”

“Pu-erh.”

“Yeah, that…I don’t think—”

“You don’t like it.”

Dean has the grace to at least look a little embarrassed. “Yeah, no. Dude, it tastes like soil. It _smells_ like soil.”

Cas straightens and Dean is relieved to see that he doesn’t really look disappointed. Instead, Cas just lifts his own tea bowl to his mouth and sips, something like serenity settling over his expression.

“In my travels, I have discovered that pu-erh is not for everybody,” he says wisely.

“So you travel for your job, then?” Dean pushes his still-full tea bowl closer to Cas before drifting over to what is now rapidly becoming his specialized tea cabinet. Gone are the boxes of bagged tea; in their places are over half a dozen tins, each filled with a different tea, each gifted by Cas to Dean and the Café for the past week he’d come visiting, always just before closing time.

“Yes,” replies Cas as Dean selects a strawberry green tea blend of which even Cas had been dubious (Dean had loved it, but he’d never admit it).

Cas hadn’t really referenced his work since the first night he’d wandered in and Dean hadn’t pressed, though not for lack of curiosity. This, however, seemed like the perfect segue.

“Must be exhausting, flying all the time. Man, first time you came in here, it looked like you were going to tip over if I left you alone for too long,” Dean jokes as he prepares his new mug of tea. “Boss-man keeps you on the move?”

“You could say that,” is Cas’ amused reply.

“You said you protect people, right? What is it you do, exactly? Security? Police? Secret Service?” Dean prods. He turns around and meets Cas’ eyes through the steam rising from his mug, waggling his eyebrows. “Let me guess: you could tell me, but then you’d have to kill me?”

Alarm washes over Cas’ face so fast, Dean allows himself a moment of sorrow for not having a camera at hand to capture it. “Why would I have to—” Cas blusters before deflating a little in his coat. “I see,” he continues mournfully. “That was said in jest.”

Dean doesn’t bother with a reply, shaking his head with a huffing laugh before sipping his strawberry green tea. He waits.

“I’m not with the police,” Cas says after a while. He has this tightness to his eyes that Dean has come to learn over the past week or so means he’s being deliberately cagey. But hey, everyone’s entitled to their secrets.

“It’s cool, man,” Dean says. “You can’t really talk about it, that’s fine.”

“It isn’t that I’m forbidden to discuss my work,” Cas insists. “I have just found that such discussion doesn’t usually meet kindly with most…people.”

Dean blinks. “You’re an assassin, aren’t you?” he deadpans.

Cas’ face scrunches up in distaste. “No, Dean. I _protect_ humans,” he reiterates, somewhat disturbed at the suggestion.

“I kid, I kid,” Dean swears, guffawing. Castiel purses his lips, clearly not as amused.

“It is the nature of my work which is met with some incredulity, not the intent,” Cas sniffs, returning his attention to Dean’s mostly full bowl of pu-erh. He sets his own empty tea bowl aside, gathers the reject tea in his hands, and sips.

“Guess you don’t make it a habit to bring it up, right?” Dean replies around his own tea, inhaling the strawberry smell in the rising steam. He props his hip against the counter and waits patiently as Cas takes his time enjoying Dean’s leftover pu-erh.

“I do bring it up,” Cas says, a rueful note creeping into his voice. “And that, according to my brothers and sisters, is, apparently, precisely the problem.”

Cas having siblings is entirely new information for Dean, and he immediately opts to abandon any inquiries about Cas’ job.

“Brothers and sisters?” he prompts, trying and failing to hide his blatant curiosity. Cas seems to sense this, if the twitch at the corner of his mouth that looks like he’s trying to hold back a smile is any indication.

“Yes,” Cas murmurs, staring down into the tea bowl. Then he looks up at Dean, meets Dean’s eyes, tilts his head. “Yourself?”

“Yeah.” Dean just shrugs, tamping down on his compulsion to brag about Sam. “One little brother,” he says, without adding all the bits and pieces about him loving dogs and being a fan-freaking-tastic lawyer and looking like a damn Loreal commercial with his hair and living the dream out in California and the little iPod dock he keeps hooked up to his car instead of a proper tape deck like the nerd he is, and the hilarious bitchfaces he can just _hear_ over the phone and—

Well, that’s why Dean’s learned to forego offering information about Sam before he’s even asked for it. He’d just never stop.

“And how many do you have?” Dean continues, shaking himself out of the quagmire of all the things he could say about his little brother. Cas hesitates, looking conflicted.

“Um,” he stalls, and Dean raises his eyebrows.

“I take it your family’s not exactly a joy ride, then?” asks Dean.

“Not precisely.” Cas’ face bunches up into a little moue of puzzlement as he parses through whatever thoughts are running through his head. “We are…not all of us are close. But we do love each other. I think.”

Dean almost spits out his tea laughing then, because ain’t that just the truth.

 

When the bell over the front door jangles at half-past nine the next night, Dean’s a little surprised. Cas has been clockwork-like for his visits, always slipping into the shop at ten, not a second earlier and never usually that much later.

(Although one night Cas had stumbled in at 10:30 looking like he’d been digging graves all day, sopping wet, fucking _glitter_ all over his coat, and with a sour look on his face, and Dean hadn’t asked questions before brewing him a mug of Darjeeling. They’d carried on conversation about literally anything else, and Dean just hadn’t had it in him to ask for an explanation when Cas had reached into his coat pocket for a handkerchief and came out with a rubber ducky instead.)

Dean’s already craning around the espresso machine with a greeting for Cas queuing up on his tongue when he catches sight of a slight woman with flaming red hair. For a second, his brain stutters because he swears Charlie said in her last e-mail that she’d be spending Christmas this year with her mom in Vancouver and not with the Winchesters.

But the woman turns around and she is, very clearly, not Charlie.

“Evenin’,” Dean says, throwing on his charming barista persona and doffing an imaginary cap to her. She breaks out into a bright and lovely and familiar smile.

Wait. Why is it so familiar-looking?

“Hello,” she purrs, voice pleasantly neutral despite her pleased expression. “This must be the _Café_.” There’s a strange inflection in her voice that has Dean imagining he can even hear the capital letter.

“ _A_ café, sure, but I suppose you could say _the_ Café around these parts,” Dean chuckles. He taps at the register computer, calling up the order interface. “Is there anything I can get for you tonight?”

The woman hums and takes her time reading the menu. Behind her at the tables, a family of four gather up their belongings, throw on their coats, and leave, exclaiming at the snow swirling in the air as they trundle out the door. The place falls silent, marking the lull that Dean has now come to expect just before Cas usually arrives.

“A chai latte,” the redhead pipes up with a perfunctory rub of her fingers down the hem of her blazer, smoothing out nonexistent wrinkles. Dean notes with vague curiosity and amusement that the woman doesn’t seem to be sporting so much as a windbreaker let alone a winter jacket despite the sub-freezing temperatures outside.

“Small, medium, or large?” Dean asks.

“Small, if you will.”

“You got it.”

The woman pays and then circles around the shop as Dean steams milk and retrieves an authentic masala chai spice and tea mixture that Cas had apparently gone through a lot of trouble to find (the night he brought it to Dean, he wouldn’t say what had happened but had nevertheless seemed suspended in a weird state of combined exasperation and hilarity the whole night).

“This is beautiful,” she calls out, running her fingers along the polished woodgrain of the condiment bar.

“Thanks,” Dean responds as he sets aside the spare steaming pitcher full of steeping chai he’d bought just for this purpose. The woman doesn’t deign to continue the conversation, but Dean watches her surreptitiously as she explores. Her movements are oddly reminiscent of Cas.

Dean thinks about her smile and a vague suspicion begins to bloom in his head.

When the chai is finished steeping, he pours it through a strainer into a travel cup—he’d assumed that with her business getup, she had places to be—adds a drizzle of simple syrup and a sprinkle of cinnamon, and announces rather unnecessarily, “One small hot chai tea!” at the end of the bar.

She laughs as she approaches and links her fingers around the cup, cradling it in her hands. When she smells the chai, her eyes flick up at Dean from under her lashes, and he would have said she was flirting with him in that moment if it wasn’t for the calculating, Cas-like way she tilts her head and arches a perfectly groomed eyebrow.

Dean flashes her a smile and pretends he didn’t notice. He doesn’t ask and she doesn’t explain, drifting away to the back table by the jukebox. It’s silent now, having sadly and inexplicably given up the ghost a couple days ago.

The redhead doesn’t talk, doesn’t even seem to observe Dean as he busies himself with beginning the closing chores. Once in a while he glances up just in case she might need something, but she sits still, silent, and patient.

When the door swings open at ten on the dot, Dean is inexplicably relieved to observe the flash of tan trench coat bustling through on a gust of wind. Cas looks cold-bitten but alert, and his eyes are bright and wide even at this distance. He brings with him the tell-tale rattle of a new tea tin hidden in a pocket of his coat somewhere, and his hand is already halfway to reaching for it, and Dean already has his mouth open to say hello, when—

“Anna?” Cas blurts, stopping dead, pleasant surprise suffusing his expression. Something in Dean’s blood freezes when he shifts his attention to the redhead in the corner, currently sporting a sweet smile.

“Castiel,” she greets, her voice sounding like it’s absorbed all the warmth the weather is currently lacking. She extends an arm expectantly— _come here_ , it says—and Cas obligingly approaches, leaning over to embrace her so she doesn’t have to let go of her drink and stand.

Sometimes Dean sort of…listens in on his customers, just to while away the time while he baristas, and honestly it’s unavoidable when the shop is quiet. Of course he never remarks on anything and he never means anything by it, but it’s always intriguing to have an insight into strangers’ lives. He does, however, make it a point to actively tune out any conversations that verge into very personal territory out of respect.

Right now, as he continues to stare dumbfounded at Cas sinking down into the chair next to the redhead ( _Anna_ , his short-term memory helpfully supplies), knees at right angles to each other and touching (he can definitely see their knees bumping together beneath the table), Dean feels torn for the first time between actively eavesdropping and actively pretending he’s the only one left in his own coffee shop.

Dean, however, will be the first to admit that he’s hardly the better man, if ever, so he pretends to count the cash drawer of the register while Cas and this Anna girl chat.

“—thought you were—” Cas is in the middle of saying.

Anna interrupts with, “I was.” This makes Cas fall into contemplative silence for a beat.

“So then…?” he says.

“Yes. I’m coming home,” Anna responds, slurping up her chai, and Dean maybe hates them both a little bit for talking in fragments instead of whole sentences he can use to piece together this very odd picture. He hunches down some more and whips bills between his hands even faster in a poor portrayal of financial conscientiousness.

Cas hums, clearly pleased. “That is good news,” he tells her. Anna makes a happy sound followed by a split second of silence. Somewhere, something in Dean’s head is screaming alarm bells that if he looks up now, the two may be kissing. _May_ be. Not like he’s trying to listen for it or anything.

But Anna quickly follows up with, “You’ll introduce us, won’t you?” and the pregnant pause that follows _that_ is enough to make Dean look up from the sheaf of ones he’s shuffled through at least ten times by now. Both Anna and Cas are looking at him, and Dean somehow feels like his charade’s been caught out.

“Uh, I’m guessing you’re not asking me to introduce you two,” Dean bluffs and jokes, weakly tucking the ones back into the register.

Cas saves him from more babbling by saying, “Anna, Dean Winchester. Dean, Anna.” He gestures back and forth between the appropriate parties—hilariously unnecessary, considering they’re the only occupants right now.

“A pleasure,” purrs Anna, and this time, she sets her now-empty cup down and stands, again holding out an imperious arm. There isn’t a real reason not to come closer without being obviously and totally rude, so Dean sidles out from behind the bar and walks into Anna’s welcoming embrace, returning the gesture when he feels her buff her cheek against his and make a kissing noise.

 _Must be European_ , he thinks of her as they separate, even though he hasn’t heard anything but an American accent from her all evening. Cas must have met her during his work travels.

“I’m sorry I didn’t introduce myself before,” she says, gesturing for Dean to join them at the table, “but I wasn’t quite expecting to arrive here before Castiel, and I wasn’t sure what to say without a mutual connection.”

Dean plops heavily into a chair and falls back on his only defense: unabashed charm. “S’okay,” he says, waving his hand through the air as if to brush away her apology. “But you don’t have to worry; I don’t bite.” He winks at her.

Anna’s mouth scrunches in the way that tells Dean she’s fighting to keep her polite, tiny smile from breaking out into a full grin. The tightness in his chest eases a little and he decides he likes her a little more because of it.

“Very friendly around here,” she comments. “No wonder Castiel’s been disappearing lately.”

Cas frowns while Dean’s nascently buoyant mood quickly plummets down somewhere around his intestines.

 _Jesus Christ_ , Dean thinks, unable to help the hand that scrubs down over his face in desperation, _She thinks Cas has been out having an affair. With me._

“Who have you been speaking to?” Cas queries, tapping his fingers in quick succession. _Tpp-tpp-tpp. Tpp-tpp-tpp_. It’s such a human gesture…impatience, agitation, maybe. Cas has never seemed to fidget before. It’s a new and alien enough sight that Dean can feel himself breaking into a sweat. Never before has he ever felt guilty for not even having done anything wrong.

“Oh, you know,” Anna demurs. She doesn’t sound upset, but Dean knows this tactic. He’d seen Jess pull it on Sam a billion times: _I’m going let you lull yourself into a false sense of security so deep you give yourself enough rope to hang with_.

“Anna.” Cas’ voice goes stern. Anna coolly matches his gaze with her own. Dean feels like he’s watching a tennis match with rules he doesn’t understand and he’s never wanted so much in his life for a late night bus-full of overnight travelers to come barging in through the Café’s front door.

Anna breaks eye contact and glances down at her nails, playing at nonchalance. “Gaaabriel,” she coos, drawing out the first syllable like a song. Cas exhales through his nose and pinches the bridge of it with his forefinger and thumb. Another telling gesture.

“I had to see for myself,” she continues before Cas has a chance to speak, “if what I’d been hearing was true. I knew I was never going to get a straight answer from you, Castiel.”

Dean sucks in a breath and decides to finally speak up. “Look, Anna, it’s not what you think—”

Anna’s eyes are glittering as she rejoinders, “It is _precisely_ what I think. I don’t hear you denying it, Castiel.” She lays her hand on the tabletop and stretches her fingers until they just barely brush the knuckles of Cas’ twitching hand. He stops the tapping and stares at Anna with an odd expression Dean can’t name.

“You are a _gossip_ , Anna,” Cas announces. Anna murmurs an agreement and amiably pats the tops of his fingers.

“As you say, darling,” she tells him. The endearment makes something in Dean’s throat stick and he feels guiltier than ever, though judging by the way Cas looks no more bothered than he did a moment ago means that either Dean has absorbed Cas’ own guilt over the situation or that Cas is just asking to get his balls removed by his…girlfriend? Fiancée? Wife?

Dean doesn’t have the guts to check Cas’ left ring finger. The dozens of occasions Dean’s had reason to see Cas’ hands as he holds a mug of tea or curiously looks over vacuum-sealed bags of coffee beans or grips around the legs of upturned chairs during close, and Dean’s never noticed whether or not Cas even sports a ring.

“I won’t keep you,” Anna says, standing. Both men shoot up out of their seats after her, Cas to walk her to the door and Dean to wobble back behind the counter where he can just get away from whatever the hell awful situation it was he just had to sit through.

It’s nearing eleven but Dean grabs the one double portafilter he hasn’t scrubbed out yet and crams it against the pressure plate of the burr grinder until the basket fills up with grounds. At home, this would call for double shots of whiskey. Here, a double espresso would have to do.

Even the burr grinder isn’t enough to stop Dean from hearing Anna’s gentle, “You haven’t returned home in so long, Castiel. We miss you.”

 _We_ , Dean thinks, trying to wheeze past the sudden constriction around his heart. Images of Cas and Anna and kids with Cas’ blue eyes and Anna’s red hair sprout unbidden in his mind.

“You know me, Anna,” Cas tells her, hand at the small of her back as they pause at the door. “I cannot.”

“You are different now.” Anna’s voice is strangely pitched, as if she meant to phrase her remark as an accusation and changed her mind halfway through. Beyond that, Dean doesn’t bother trying to parse out what she means. He begins counting how long it takes to pull his espresso shots, listening at the pressure hissing inside the machine.

“I always have been.”

“More and less than you know.” Oddly, Anna sounds fond.

The shots take twenty-two seconds to pull. By the time Dean looks up, Anna’s gone and in her place is a little whirlwind of snow sucked in from the outside through the open door. Cas is standing half-in, half-out, and from the looks of it he seems to be craning his face upwards at the slate-gray winter sky.

After a moment or two, Cas comes back to himself and steps inside. “I was expecting her to still be in Kandahar,” sighs Cas, pulling the door shut and conscientiously shaking off snowflakes onto the inside doormat.

“Some surprise, huh?” Dean forces through his teeth. His hands are tense around the demitasse cup holding the espresso and he sucks it down, glad for the bitter pucker in his mouth as the coffee layers over his tongue.

“Yes,” Cas says from the bar, and Dean jumps at the sudden closeness of his voice.

“Jesus, Cas,” he gasps, disregarding Cas’ disapproving purse of lips at the exclamation, “I need to get you a bell or something.” Dean sets the cup down with a decisive _plunk_ to cover the adrenaline-trembling of his hands.

“That won’t be necessary. Here.” From out of the depths of his coat Cas retrieves the tin Dean had heard earlier, brandishes it in case Dean somehow didn’t notice, and pushes it gently across the bar.

It does please Dean to see that Cas still doesn’t appear to have any compunctions about gifting tea to him and the Café, despite Anna, so he can’t feel bad about reaching for the tin, popping the top, and wafting the scent of the leaves within.

“Almond,” Dean announces. Cas nods. “Rose.” Nod. “Vanilla.” Nod. “Keemun?” Shake of the head. No, then. “Assam.” Nod-nod-nod.

“You’re getting better at this.” Cas sounds impressed, and it soothes a little the uncomfortable ache Anna’s visit had left inside Dean.

As usual, Dean lets Cas help himself to the quickly growing collection of tea accoutrements the Café is beginning to accrue so they can share the new blend. Dean watches Cas move through much-practiced motions, leaning back against the counter, and he thinks about Cas’ arms around Anna’s shoulders, Cas’ voice mixing with Anna’s in the open air between them, Cas’ knee brushing Anna’s under the table.

Unable to help it anymore, Dean breaks the silence with, “So…Anna.”

“What about her?” Cas takes the little filter baskets that fit just inside the mugs and gives them a little shake to let the tea leaves bloom in the hot water.

Dean clears his throat and crosses his arms, hunching in further, defensive. “You, uh…I didn’t know you’d been skipping out on her to come hang out here,” he mumbles, trying for subtle prompting and likely (definitely) failing.

Cas’ eyebrows twitch and meet in the middle, confused, as he affixes the lid back onto the tea tin and responds with, “There was no…‘skipping out,’ as you put it. I told you. She was sent to do our Lord’s work in Kandahar. That’s where she has been.”

There goes that “Lord” thing again, but that’s not the bone Dean’s looking to pick right now. He tries a different tactic and pretends the tea cabinet needs rearranging, batting Cas’ hand aside to get to the shelves. Cas says nothing and hikes himself up to sit on the counter and watch as Dean pointlessly moves tins and boxes and bags around.

Again, Dean is reminded of a bird, this time perching amongst the syrup bottles and mug racks and stacks of to-go cups.

“Anna means well,” Cas muses aloud, unperturbed when Dean only grunts in return. “She knows me best. But she can be somewhat heavy-handed.”

“They tend to be like that sometimes,” Dean mumbles back, thinking about how Jess can get Sam to do whatever she damn well pleases sometimes. Cas tilts his head and narrows his eyes.

“You understand. I didn’t know you had a sister as well,” he says, and Dean drops the tin of sencha he’d had in hand. Luckily it doesn’t burst open upon impact with his toe.

“Son of a bitch!” Dean cusses more out of reflex than pain, hopping around as Cas chuckles at his expense, and if he’s swearing because he finally figured out the real reason Anna’s habits seemed so much like Cas’, well no one needs to know but him.

 

“Why coffee, Dean?” Cas asks. He’s up atop the counter again, kicking his legs out and tapping his heels against the cabinet doors beneath like a six year old. He has a regular mug in one hand full of latte (really more milk and sugar than espresso, to be honest, the only way they’ve discovered that Cas will tolerate coffee) and one of his little iron tea bowls full of Russian Caravan in the other.

Dean shrugs as he sweeps piles of accumulated coffee grounds around the espresso machine into the trash can. “Dunno. Seemed like the thing to do, I think.”

Unsatisfied with the answer, Cas sets down the tea bowl and pelts a straw wrapper at Dean’s head, who swears and threatens to make Cas clean the shop. Of course, they ignore the fact that Dean never would actually make him do it, though Cas would volunteer to sweep anyway even without prompts or threats.

“I am genuinely inquiring, Dean,” Cas grumbles, settling his hand protectively over top of his tea in case Dean launches a projectile back. “You don’t seem the type.”

“To own a coffee shop?”

“To have grown up with the intention of brewing espresso for a career,” Cas elaborates, cocking an eyebrow, perhaps sensing that Dean would have taken his question as an affront to his blue-collar job.

Chastened for assuming Cas would ever deride him like that, Dean clambers up onto the counter opposite of Cas and gives his question serious thought. Ever placid, Cas just takes alternate sips of his sort-of latte and tea.

“The atmosphere, I guess,” Dean offers after a few minutes, dissatisfied with his own explanation even as it’s coming out of his mouth. He tries again. “I spent a lot of time in coffee shops when I was getting my associate’s. I lived with Sammy back then—”

“Ah, yes. Your younger brother, whom you’re picking up from the airport tomorrow for Christmas.”

“Yeah, him. Anyway, I spent a lot of time at one out there in Palo Alto, met some of my best friends there…it was nice to be in one, just keep drinking warm stuff, and it was usually quiet. Good for relaxing or doing work.”

Cas fixes Dean with a stare that says he isn’t getting the answers he wants. Dean sighs and stares up at the ceiling, thinking, and tries again.

“I wanted to be a policeman when I was a kid,” he begins, dredging up memories of the leather and cleaner smell of John’s cruiser, admiring the sheen of his father’s badge. “Protecting people…that seemed right.

“Figured out real fast it wasn’t exactly ‘cops and robbers’. My mom used to keep the TV on all the time whenever she was at home and I used to think she just really liked watching TV a lot. Then I figured that it was always on the news channels and every time something bad happened nearby, she’d get this look on her face, like she was preparing for war or something.” Dean laughs, but even to his ears it sounds brittle and forced. “I think she wanted to be ready in case some of Dad’s guys ever had to come to the house and…you know. I think she was expecting the worst, every time.”

“Must have been hard,” Cas murmurs. Dean waves away his concern.

“For her? Sure. Me and Sammy, we were just kids, we didn’t know better. Mom always kept it together, we never really knew how much she had worried until we were grown up. I only figured this all out after…well, Dad’s partner, he may as well have been my uncle or something, he got shot when I was, hell, nineteen, twenty?”

For a moment, Dean flashes back to mopping up the Roadhouse, to Carole King and Ash all alone in the wreckage of an abandoned bar and Mary Winchester with a rubber band in her teeth as she gathers her hair, to Sam’s gawky teenage face looking wane in the shadows of the car as they drove to be there for the Harvelles.

Cas follows Dean’s gaze to where it zeroes in on the silent jukebox, but doesn’t say a word.

“Didn’t know what I wanted to do for the longest time,” continues Dean, flicking an imaginary piece of lint off his apron for lack of anything better to do with his hands. “I wasn’t lying about the Palo Alto part though. It was the first place I was starting to feel like I was doing something good with my life. By that time bars weren’t so fun for me and even if they were, Sam had Jess and they weren’t into that stuff, so we made time for each other with coffee meet-ups. And Jess’ roommate was a barista there, so then we all could get together.”

“Family is very important to you.” Cas’ observation is phrased as a statement, not a question, and Dean nods, somehow unable to look Cas in the eye.

He’s not used to this touchy-feely business, but he’s gotten going and he may as well finish.

“Since then the idea’s been in the back of my head, I guess. Having someplace to offer people to go, where people can just _be_ with whoever the hell they want, no pressure. Just sit and chat and have a drink that doesn’t end up in someone getting shitfaced.” Dean thinks about the Winchesters and Harvelles having lunch at the Roadhouse, then he thinks of the Winchester/Moore/Bradbury clan in the coffee shop all those years ago in Palo Alto.

“Then this place just fell into my lap.” Dean shrugs. “And it seemed right.”

Cas’ voice is soft with sincerity as he offers, “It’s a fine place, Dean,” and damn if that doesn’t touch the tender spots in Dean’s heart that he likes to pretend he doesn’t have. He covers up how moved he is by coughing.

“Yeah. Just didn’t want to ever make my mom worry like she did for my dad, you know? But I wanted to give something back to the people Dad’s been protecting all his life. So here I am, giving back. And giving out caffeine while I’m at it. I roast in-house, you know,” Dean lamely adds, trying to steer the conversation away from the serious stuff. Cas’ indulgent smiles lets him know that Cas sees the ruse for what it really is, but because Cas is awesome, Cas doesn’t press.

“I may be beginning to see it your way,” the man says, staring down into his coffee mug as if surprised it’s already empty. Dean rolls his eyes and hops off the counter, snatching the mug away from Cas and heading for the sink

“I’d barely count this as coffee, but since you don’t normally drink _regular_ joe let alone espresso, I’m cutting you off now,” he barks over the rush of the faucet. It’s comical how Cas droops a little in his trench coat and looks down into his now-cold bowl of Russian Caravan, looking a little underwhelmed for the first time.

 

It’s less comical when it’s already past midnight and Cas is still so wired after finishing all the closing chores that he’s now taken to trying to scrub out coffee rings on the condiment bar with a spare bottle brush. But Cas has learned to join Dean in singing the chorus to Eye of the Tiger to make up for the dead jukebox, tilting his shoulders and bumping his ribcage side to side under his coat in a semi-dance to the beat, and even though he has less than six hours before he has to be at the airport to pick up Sam and Jess, Dean really can’t be anything less than happy.

 

Sam had put up an almighty fuss when Dean had clambered into the Impala two nights before Christmas for his usual evening shift at the Café.

“C’mon, Dean,” he’d whined, the twitching at the corners of his lips giving away that he really would always be a little shit who liked to push his older brother’s buttons. “You’re gonna work while Jess and I are in town? You don’t want to sing Christmas carols to the radio and watch—” He’d paused here to look over the jacket of the VHS tape Jess had slapped into his hand for their family movie night in a pique of nostalgia. “— _Beauty and the Beast: the Enchanted Christmas_ ,” Sam finished reading out, voice pitching with ill-concealed amusement.

Dean had only thrown him the one-fingered salute as he shrugged on his jacket and shoved out the door, earning him a deep-chested laugh from Sam and an indignant yell from Mary, who still somehow had eyes in the back of her head for sussing out the kinds of trouble her boys (men now, really) got into even after all these years.

Thinking about it makes Dean chuckle to himself as he trundles back and forth from the storeroom to the front-of-house fridges restocking gallon jugs of milk. He didn’t have to come in today; he could have put literally anyone else on the schedule so close to Christmas and there are always staff who are clamoring for overtime and extra hours, but he was feeling light and happy and all that fuzzy-wuzzy holiday spirit shit, so he comes here to the Café to take advantage of the fact that with the mood he’s in, even the nitty-gritty of coffee shop chores can’t feel like drudgery.

He likes to think it’s his way of spreading a little Christmas cheer, because the bright little cherry-red felt stockings with all the employees’ names on them tacked up around the shop certainly wasn’t his idea.

(“But they’re…they’re ugly.”

“Don’t you fucking dare tell me what to do, Dean Winchester.”

“Jo, you don’t even work here.”

“It’ll brighten the place up.”

“Well, I sure think they look great, Miss Jo.”

“See? Garth likes them!”)

Dean hums to himself as he goes about his business, already day-dreaming about being able to go back to his parents’ house to hang out for the rest of the night and seeing Sam back in their childhood home.

But before that happens, he has somebody to wait for.

“Hello, Dean.”

Dean jumps at the voice behind him and his off-hand passes under the stream of the espresso machine hot water dispenser.

 

“Well, it definitely could have been worse,” Dean jokes, attempting to lift Cas’ morose mood. Cas only grumbles and adjusts his grip around Dean’s wrist, repositioning their hands under the cold tap water running from the faucet.

“I apologize,” Cas mutters for probably the millionth time in five minutes. He cranes his head across Dean’s front to read over the webpage pulled up on Dean’s iPhone, set down on the opposite side of the sink. “WebMD says to do this for ten to twenty minutes.”

Dean snorts. “It’s not that bad. Seriously. Like, ten more seconds and I’ll be good.”

Cas’ face grows stormy.

Dean decides not to point out when the ten seconds are up.

“It isn’t in my nature to leave well enough alone when someone is in distress,” Cas remarks a minute later. His grip around Dean’s hand tightens when Dean flexes his fingers (they’re getting a little pruny), but when it’s apparent that Dean has no intention of yanking his hand away from the water, Cas relaxes.

“Right,” Dean replies, resigning himself to standing at the sink for the next fifteen minutes and leaning his hip against the counter. “Your job.”

“I protect people,” Cas says, echoing what he had told Dean the first time he’d wandered into the shop. “I do not hurt them. I would not.”

The vehement insistence in his voice makes the humor Dean had been mustering fade. You didn’t need to be a shrink to realize that there was a story there.

“I know, Cas,” he reassures him, voice gone soft. “It was an accident. That’s all.” Cas graces him with a smile for that and Dean fights the urge to turn his hand over in Cas’ grasp and grip his fingers back.

“I used to lead an entire garrison,” Cas continues, his eyes unfocused as he sifts through memories, mindlessly adjusting their hands under the running water. Dean has no idea what that could possibly mean, but he remains silent. “It was a position of honor. My garrison in particular was well-lauded. We were warriors, our Father’s fiercest, and most loyal.”

The words, “ _Your father?_ ” are on Dean’s lips but he grinds his teeth together to keep his mouth shut. Somehow, this feels like something Cas wouldn’t admit to just anyone. And something like that deserved attention and respect.

“—and I grew over-bold,” Cas is in the middle of saying. “I thought I could discern our Lord’s greater purpose for myself. I thought I could accomplish even greater tasks than those I had been given.

“Now I see that what I considered zeal was little more than destructiveness. God’s work was done through me with violence…but God’s work is done also through mercy and kindness.”

 _You’re kind, Cas_ , Dean wants to say, recalling images of Cas carrying back tins of tea in his coat pockets, Cas’ hands around broom handles it wasn’t his job to wield. _You_ are _kind. You are good._ Dean bites his tongue instead, willing the other man to hear his thoughts even while Cas stares unseeingly at the wall.

Before him, Cas’ face twists in a rictus of pain remembered and continues, “For every shadow of evil I vanquished on a mission, there was a soul in need whose prayers and missives I ignored in favor of what I believed to be my greater goal: to curb the forces of Lucifer in this world.

 “I smote evil, but I refused to diminish the suffering of my charges in even the small ways. I thought I was above guardianship.” Cas’ smile this time is wry, bitter like the Keemun tea Dean now kept in the cabinet above them.

“For my disregard, for my pride, I was struck down and banished here to Earth…an eternity of shepherding for a warrior of God,” Cas chuckles, but to Dean’s ears it sounds more like a sigh.

The somber mood the conversation had taken is a sour taste in Dean’s mouth, and because he is sometimes an idiot, Dean blurts, “Well that sounds like one hell of a job description.”

Cas turns his gaze on him, a strange, twisted, indiscernible expression on his face, and Dean has a few brief seconds to reconsider his life choices. Mortification makes his fingertips go cold (or maybe that’s still just the tap water) and he opens his mouth to attempt to backtrack when Cas bursts out laughing.

Cas laughs deeply, bowing at his solar plexus as if his body is trying to squeeze out every trace of humor from within it. His hands relinquish their grip on Dean’s wrist and clutch around his chest, trailing damp handprints across the fabric of his coat, and his eyes scrunch around the edges.

 _He looks younger like this_ , Dean thinks, still bewildered at the sudden hilarity. _He looks so light._

“Dean,” Cas wheezes, unable to catch his breath. “Dean—” He dissolves into laughter again, and this time, Dean joins him.

“Man,” Dean chuckles around a particularly raucous fit of howling, “you are way too damn serious for Christmas Eve-Eve.” He straightens up and throws his arm over Cas’ shoulders, knocking them off-balance before Cas manages to reach up and grab at Dean’s wrist again, steadying them both.

The rush of the tap water is loud in the sudden pause stretching between them. They’re standing almost eye to eye, and this close up, Cas looks every bit like the overworked tax accountant Dean took him for the first night he came into the Café: crow’s feet forking out into the skin around his eyes, tell-tale strands of gray hiding in the dark hair at his temples, rough stubble forever suspended at five o’clock. There’s a tightness to the muscles around the corners of his mouth like he’s spent more time frowning than not, and when Cas exhales, it sounds like the release of a gasp instead of a measured breath.

Cas looks tired.

Dean would be hard-pressed to explain what possessed him to reach out with the hand draped over Cas’ shoulder and catch his fingers, but he does it. Cas says nothing; he grips back without question, hooking their fingers together more comfortably.

“I don’t really get it,” Dean admits in an unnecessarily quiet voice, eyes cast to the floor between their feet. “I still don’t really follow what it is you…well, do. But Cas, you are the last person I’d have picked to not care about us little people. That isn’t you. I know it isn’t. You’re more than what you’ve done, what you think you’ve done. Or haven’t done. You’re more than that.”

Dean doesn’t do the touchy-feely stuff, but the words he’d been locking behind his teeth come out easier than he thought they would. He looks back up to meet Cas’ gaze.

Cas blinks long and slow before his eyes drift shut. His head tilts forward at a glacial pace.

For a split second that Dean doesn’t really feel like analyzing, his heart stutters, flips over, then stops completely (or nearly so anyways) when Cas’ forehead comes to rest against his.

“Hardly ‘little people’, Dean,” Cas murmurs, voice pitched so low that Dean has to strain to hear it. “I’ve learned that much in my time here on Earth. Everyone counts. Everyone matters.” Eyes still shut, Cas breaks into a smile, the open, expansive one that Dean has come to learn means utter sincerity.

Dean can’t help it; he smiles too, and can’t help cheekily remarking, “Even baristas who think tea only comes in green or black?”

Cas opens his eyes, squints, then playfully shoves Dean, leaving a wet handprint across the upper arm of his shirt. They laugh together again and Dean grabs a cleaning rag for the counters as Cas reaches over to turn off the tap, which is why Dean only almost misses it when Cas murmurs under his breath, “Especially them, Dean. Especially them.”

 

It’s Christmas Eve, and the Café has been closed to the public for five hours already.

Dean isn’t sure how he’s going to explain to his family why and where he went missing after the Winchesters’ Christmas Eve dinner, but he figures he’ll cross that bridge when he gets to it. For now, he’s too busy brewing tea and making sure he gets it perfect.

He’s man enough to admit he might screw this one up anyways; he’s flying blind with a tea he’s never tried before, a Thai tea blend he picked up himself this morning from a tea and spice shop in the heart of the city’s historic district. It’s a black tea, he knows, he can smell how thick and strong it is, but the little star-shaped seed pods in it (“Star anise,” the shopkeeper called it when Dean had dubiously poked around in the jar) and the dried bits of what look like fruit is lending the blend a sweetly spicy tone.

It’s different, but good.

Behind the counter, the kettle is gurgling, and in front of the counter, one of the tables is set with a simple cast iron teapot, burnished cobalt blue and stamped with bare branches and swallows. Two mismatched for-here mugs sit at the ready (“Welcome to Hartford!” and “Shoot for the moon; even you miss”-yadda yadda), and Dean, for maybe the third time, peers side-eyed into the strainer basket of the teapot to make sure he added the appropriate number of teaspoons.

“Okay, Cas,” he mutters under his breath. “Let’s see if I remember anything of what you taught me.”

He pours hot water over the leaves and lets it steep while he sets a vinyl on the record player he’d borrowed from home: AC/DC, starting with _Back in Black_.

It’s an unconventional, un-festive way to spend Christmas Eve to be sure, but Cas makes unconventional company; sharing eggnog and carols just wouldn’t feel right despite the little red employee Christmas stockings.

First thing on December 26th, Dean vows, those little red stockings are coming down.

But first…

Dean glances at the coffee cup clock. It’s just a couple minutes shy of ten. One minute ‘til, the tea timer on his phone goes off and he fishes the strainer out of the teapot, cussing because he forgot how hot the iron would get and didn’t realize it until after he had the lid in his palm.

At ten, he plops down into a chair, fiddles with the holiday edition of Angry Birds on his phone, and waits.

At quarter after, he just goes ahead and sips a mug of tea he pours for himself. This new blend tastes really pretty good, actually.

At half past, he starts contemplating how he’ll explain his absence to his family, and especially to Sam because the Sasquatch always seems to know when something’s up with his brother’s personal life.

Five minutes after that, Dean decides he doesn’t care what Sam’s going to want to ask and starts worrying about Cas instead. He changes the record on the turntable: Kansas, _Dust in the Wind_.

At quarter to eleven, all the tea in the pot is gone, but Dean doesn’t refill the kettle. He’s struggling to read a blog article on his phone about the benefits of mint tea, but ignoring the knot of disappointment in his throat is actually rather harder to do than he’d anticipated.

At eleven, he glances out the front windows for maybe the hundredth time. Snow is drifting down again, but it’s soft and gentle without the winter wind behind it.

It’s a quarter past eleven, and Dean’s outside and snapping the buttons of his coat shut, already-chilly fingers fumbling in the pockets for his shop keys. He crouches over the doorknob to lock it, and he makes the mistake of glancing in through the window.

The service light above the bar that he keeps on after hours casts an amber glow over the abandoned blue iron teapot on the table, giving it a long, black shadow over the polished wood. It would look pretty freakin’ poetic if the last hour hadn’t made Dean feel quite this bummed out.

Actually, “bummed out” doesn’t really cover it. He couldn’t even bring himself to clean and put away the teapot and tea things properly.

Dean sighs and turns away, remembering just a second too late that the turntable had also been left running.

He groans, passes a hand over his eyes, and pivots about-face to unlock the shop yet again when he sees motion out of the corner of his eye.

An unexpected adrenaline spike makes the hair on the back of Dean’s neck prickle, his spine stiffen, and he whirls around to plaster his back against the wall like a cornered animal. It’s suddenly too hot under the collar of his coat and by pure reflex, his hand dives down into his jeans pocket for the pocketknife he keeps there.

There’s a man in the middle of the parking lot, swaying slightly in the snowdrifts. A hand reaches out for Dean—no, his arms are spreading to keep his balance—and the man takes one step, two more, then stumbles. He catches himself at the last second, one knee bent down into the snow.

Dean bounds out into the lot before his brain can catch up with his body, pocketknife forgotten, fight-or-flight nerves drained away. He almost takes a spill as he passes the Impala but grabs onto the side mirror just in time, fumbling the rest of the way despite his well-treaded boots.

For the first time since they’ve met, Cas looks like he’s cold. He’s still hunched on bended knee, shoulders obviously tight even under the coat, shivering and collecting snowflakes across his back and neck. Dean doesn’t bother with niceties, just leans over and hauls Cas up by the armpits.

“Hey Cas,” he calls, somehow sounding muffled by the snowfall. Dean wraps a hand behind Cas’ neck, shaking a little to knock him out of whatever daze he’s in. Cas makes eye contact, but it’s clear he’s not focusing.

“Cas,” Dean tries again, softer but more urgent. “C’mon, Cas, talk to me.” He drapes Cas’ arm across his shoulders, hefts his weight up against himself and grunting with the effort. A little at a time, he shuffles the two of them to the Café door; the hems of Dean’s pant legs are crusted with snow by the time they make it, and Cas is almost boneless in his grip.

The blast of heated air as they tumble through the doorway is just about the sweetest feeling of Dean’s life. His teeth are chattering, but he grits them against his own discomfort and pulls Cas over to the table he himself had vacated not five minutes previously, settling Cas into one of the chairs like a pile of damp laundry.

Cas says nothing and only continues to shiver, scrunched up in his trench coat and resembling a little brown songbird, soaked and knocked out of the sky by a storm.

Dean sets to heating up water in the kettle, watching Cas as he goes and not even attempting to hide the concern in his expression. He isn’t sure what happened, but he’s sure that if Cas doesn’t want to talk about it, he’ll never find out.

He’s also sure that if Cas does want to explain how he came to be standing all alone and close to collapse in a snowy parking lot on Christmas Eve, he’ll say something on his own time.

Dean pulls a familiar tin out from the cupboard—Monk’s Blend, one he knows to be a favorite of Cas’—prepares a pot full of it, and sets a timer. When he’s finished, Dean crams his hands into his pockets and leans a hip against the counter, assessing Cas. He still hasn’t budged.

“Cas,” Dean repeats, gentle this time. “You’re soaking, man. You’ve got to be cold. Coat’s gotta come off.”

Cas starts, awakening from his stupor. His eyes flicker around the room, cataloging everything, as if surprised by his sudden change of environment.

“Right,” he croaks, and Dean winces. It sounds like Cas hasn’t slept for days, and the shadows under his eyes aren’t really doing anything to refute that idea.

Slowly, painfully, Cas rises out of his chair and peels himself out of the trench coat. It drops to the floor with a dull, wet _flump_.

“How long were you out there?” Dean asks as Cas begins pawing at the tie around his neck.

“Not very,” Cas admits, grimacing as the tie tightens more with every tug at the knot. “But I was elsewhere before that, and it was snowing there too. Heavily.”

The timer rings then, sudden and shrill. Dean carries the teapot over and fills the two mugs from earlier, then sets it down.

“Let me,” he says, and Cas drops his hands. Dean reaches forward for the silk tie and begins worming his fingers through the knot, methodically loosening the loops and turns.

“You’re gonna work yourself to death like, Cas,” Dean mumbles, eyes focused solely on the tie. He can feel Cas looking at him, but he’s not going to look back. He doesn’t do the whole touchy-feely thing after all, and if they don’t make eye contact, then Dean can keep on pretending he isn’t as worried as he is.

“I have my duty to fulfill, Dean,” Cas responds, his voice regaining a little bit of its usual primness. Inwardly, Dean sighs in relief. That sounds more like it.

The tie comes loose and Dean tugs at one end; the rest comes slithering over Cas’ shoulder.

“There,” Dean announces, offering it back. Delicately, deliberately, as if cautious, Cas reaches out and scoops the tie from out of Dean’s palm. His fingertips are cold and Dean involuntarily shivers.

“Dean.” Cas’ voice is soft but somber, his opposite hand also frigid through the cotton of Dean’s shirt as it fists itself in the fabric above Dean’s breastbone.

It’s a slow fall, really, rather than a lean, until Cas has his forehead nocked into the curve just inside of Dean’s shoulder. They’re so close now that Dean can feel Cas’ breaths against his own chest, the weight of Cas’ entire arm pulling at his front as if Cas can’t find the energy to hold his own limbs aloft. Dean’s hands hesitantly flutter by Cas’ shoulders, unsure of what to do.

“Cas—” Dean begins, but the other man beats him to the punch.

“Do you believe in angels?” Cas asks.

Whatever it is that Dean is expecting to hear, it certainly isn’t that.

“Cas…”

“Do you believe in angels, Dean Winchester?” Cas repeats.

Dean lets his hands fall to his sides. Next to him, the mugs of tea continue steaming, warming the skin along his arm. He sighs and grinds the heels of his hands into his eye sockets.

“My mom used to tell me and Sammy that angels were watching over us,” he murmurs. “I don’t know, Cas. I don’t know if I believe in angels.”

Though Cas’ face is still obscured by his position, Dean fancies he can sense the other man smile before letting go and sinking back into his chair. He laughs and leans his forehead into his hand.

“There is perhaps no season more than your human Christmas-time in which people are so intent on praying for favors, for miracles,” Cas sighs as Dean lowers himself into a second chair, utterly lost now. Cas scrubs his palm down his face and looks up at the ceiling, his face somewhere between exasperated and contemplative. He continues, “They look upwards to us for guidance.”

 _Us_ repeats over and over in Dean’s head and his throat goes a little dry as his mind makes a massive, irrational leap of logic. _Angels_ , it pipes up, _us_.

At a loss, Dean grabs his mug and gulps down a mouthful of tea. It’s the only response he can think of making, even though the tea is almost too hot to stand just yet.

If Cas notices Dean’s speechlessness, he doesn’t comment. Instead, he redirects his gaze to his yet-untouched mug and says aloud, more to himself maybe than to Dean, “I wonder if maybe it occurred to anyone that the angels could look down upon the earth and ask the exact same thing of you.”

Dean’s heart is hammering miles a minute.

 _You_ , his mind repeats back to him.

_You. Us. Humans. Angels._

Before him, Cas is almost rueful as he leans forward, elbows on knees and hands clasped together in between. He stares at the places where his own fingers intertwine. “We know our place,” he continues. “We have our duties. Our missions. I used to be a warrior. Now I am a guardian.

“But you…” Cas looks up suddenly, eyes bright and blue, blue, blue. Dean feels like a deer in headlights, under scrutiny, and his grip around the mug tightens for reasons he can’t name.

“You humans are lost. You cannot even begin to conceive for yourself where you belong. Your lives are little more than never-ending struggles to anyone who has not watched you as we have.” Shamelessly, Cas’ eyes rove Dean’s face, Dean’s posture, as if trying to read answers from him.

Dean puts the mug down onto the tabletop, suddenly afraid he’ll drop it. His fingers shake when he lets go and he closes his eyes, tired and aware for the first time of how late it must be getting.

When Cas starts again, his voice is gentler. Fond. A little awed, maybe.

“Humans are passionate, compassionate. Determined. Contradictory. You have no trajectory yet exist in constant forward movement. You don’t know where you are, but impossibly, you figure out where to go. Angels have missions, but our duties end and begin and end again. We exist endlessly.

“I wonder, Dean Winchester,” Cas says, “why, then, humans pray to angels whose existence they cannot even prove when it is us, who can look upon you from our place in Heaven, who should bear witness to your example and follow it.”

Silence falls. Only the rustle of Cas’ clothes as he readjusts his position in his seat and the fuzzy hum of the needle at the end of the vinyl record indicate to Dean that the world outside of his closed eyes is still revolving, still moving on.

Moving forward, is what Cas had said.

Cas. Castiel. The _angel_.

The angel in a crumpled gray suit, tie-less, with an overlarge trench coat pooled around his feet and seeping snow-water, bearing tea instead of miracles (Dean isn’t exactly the praying type, after all).

It occurs to Dean suddenly that maybe his first impression of Castiel had only been half right.

Maybe Cas hadn’t been tired all this time…just lost.

“What is that?”

Dean jolts out of his reverie at the question and follows Cas’ line of sight to the record player nearby. The vinyl on the turntable is still spinning, spitting out blank white noise.

Instead of answering, Dean rises, taking his tea as he goes and sipping single-handedly as his unoccupied hand spreads the accompanying stack of records across the tabletop. He hears Cas stir behind him, feels the vibrations of Cas’ footsteps through the floor as he comes closer.

“This is a record player,” Dean explains. “It works like the jukebox. You put the vinyl on the turntable and lay the needle down and it plays the music. You just gotta do it yourself where the jukebox will do it for you.”

Cas watches closely as Dean sets his tea aside and removes the record from its sleeve. The inner sleeve is yellowed and brittle, almost tissue paper at this point and marked by fingerprints…all signs of a well-loved, well-used record. Dean slides the vinyl out and holds it up for Cas’ inspection.

“See these grooves?” Dean asks. Cas nods and takes the vinyl in hand, pinching it at the edges with his index fingers and thumb like he’d seen Dean do. He flips it over and around, holding it up to the light and then down again where he could squint at the label and read it. “These are the songs. You put the needle in a set of grooves, it’ll play whatever song it is as the record spins.”

Cas delicately holds the record out, offering it back. He looks livelier now that his interest is piqued. “Show me,” he requests, though his words come out sounding more like a command than anything else. Dean only chuckles and gestures for him to set the vinyl down while he removes the Kansas record from the turntable.

Dean has the new record playing in short order.

The beginning number opens with the throaty _blumm blumm blumm_ of a plucked double bass, cymbals articulating a crisp, steady rhythm. Ella Fitzgerald’s sultry warble follows, floating as thick and close as a cloud of smoke above the twanging guitar.

He’s not sure why he picked this one out-of-place record of all the others he’d brought along. Maybe it’s the lateness of the hour, maybe it’s the ponderous, lazy fall of the fat snowflakes outside, maybe it’s the lull of the silence between him and Cas. Maybe it’s because the likes of Ella Fizgerald, this singular record squeezed in between those belonging to Plant and Morrison, Scott and Roth, are the only ones who really belong in the surreal suspension of the nighttime hours between one day and the next.

Maybe it’s because it was very nearly this same spot on which Dean and Cas stand where a teenage Dean danced to Carole King with his mother one night long ago.

“Cas,” Dean blurts, holding out his hand. Cas, entranced by the spinning record, startles, considering Dean’s proffered fingers with blank expectation, waiting for instruction.

 _Now you say you’re lonely_ , Ella croons. _You cried the long night through._

“Dance with me,” Dean says. The piano under Ella’s voice sounds wistful to his ears.

_Well you can cry me a river._

Cas cocks an eyebrow. Narrows his eyes. “Dean?”

_Cry me a river._

“Trust me.”

_I cried a river over you._

Cas’ fingers are still chilly when they slip into the cup of Dean’s palm. Dean curls his own over them, and though it’s the middle of winter, though it’s Christmas Eve and the snow outside is falling as hard as ever, Dean thinks of sunlight and open sky.

“Come here,” Dean mumbles before he loses the nerve. He tugs and Cas steps forward, taking Dean by the upper arm out of instinct. The pressure of his hand through Dean’s shirtsleeve feels like a brand.

Ella’s voice slips and tumbles down the next verse as Dean shifts side to side, Cas following. He doesn’t resist when Dean lightly curves his other arm around Cas’ ribcage, tucking him in the crook of his elbow, fingertips barely skimming the fabric of the white button-down.

“We’re dancing. I think,” Cas observes, voice low.

“Thanks, Captain Obvious,” Dean quips, his own voice equally subdued. He quirks a small grin. Cas’ answering smile, while as reserved and measured as ever, nevertheless looks brilliant.

Dean feels warm.

They sway like that, thoroughly unhurried while the cymbals pick up the pace as the words slide back into the chorus. Cas trips on the toes of his shoes once and, laughing for the first time this evening, he surprises even Dean by kicking them off. Dean follows suit and when they come back together, they press even closer.

They laugh some more when Dean attempts to lead Cas through a turn under his arm and Cas utterly loses all sense of coordination. Cas’ arm ends up behind him and Dean’s hand is somehow flipped palm-up where their fingers twine together. They reset, impossibly closer still.

 _‘Cause I cried, how I cried a river over you_ , Ella croons. _How I cried a river over you!_

Dean has just enough time to twist Cas out to the rhythm of the closing guitar riff, stretching both their arms as far as they can extend, before the track comes to an end. Dean’s breathing comes quick after the little bit of movement, and Cas doesn’t even look winded, but they’re both grinning like idiots.

The record moves onto another number, but…

“Dean, may I?” Cas asks, leaning closer to the turntable, and Dean nods.

“Sure. Take your pick,” Dean says in response to Cas’ barely articulated question.

The brightness in Cas’ eyes at the offered choice is more gratifying than it has any right to be.

Dean shows Cas how to be careful with where he holds the record as they return it to its sleeve, how to lay down the new record just right, how to carefully set the needle. He barely spares Cas’ choice of music a glance before the record starts playing, but he’s surprised when he recognizes the bittersweet chords of the intro.

 _I took my love, I took it down_ , Stevie Nicks rasps. _Climbed a mountain and I turned around_.

Dean’s examining the vinyl cover because he doesn’t remember picking up a Fleetwood Mac album before he left the house when Cas tugs at his sleeve.

“Dance with me,” Cas requests with one hand outstretched, echoing Dean from just a handful of minutes earlier. His shirt is unbuttoned at the neck, the sleeves now rolled to his elbows, his hair is a mussed thicket, and the shadow of his scruff makes his cheeks look just the slightest bit hollow. He looks like a vagabond.

But the hint of teeth behind the curve of his lips is bright and the scrunched wrinkles of his face are soft instead of severe; his eyes remain steady, constant, open.

He looks honest.

So for the first time in a long while, Dean reaches forward and lets himself be led.

_Oh, mirror in the sky, what is love?_

Cas is no more skilled a dancer than Dean, but neither minds. They rock on their feet together between the tables of the Café, warmed by their movements, and listen to the record player. Dean grips Cas tighter, and as if in response, Cas pulls him closer. Or maybe Cas just presses himself closer.

It doesn’t matter which, as long as they’re close.

_Can the child within my heart rise above?_

Dean leans his face against Cas’, cheekbone nesting neatly against the his temple. It feels good, like something else within Dean is settling into place.

“I have existed for longer than you can comprehend,” Cas murmurs, his breath feathering along Dean’s jaw, his ear. “I have battled on the lands of nations which no longer have a name and flown the skies over landmarks which have risen and fallen both.”

Dean thinks about long roads through the Rockies, whooping at the wind roaring through the open windows of the Impala.

_Can I sail through the changing ocean tides?_

“It was my arrogance that felled me. I neglected my greatest duty to my Father’s children.”

Dean remembers watching John and Mary fall away in his rearview mirror when he left for California, then watching Sam and Jess do the same when he left Palo Alto.

_Can I handle the seasons of my life?_

“I have been tireless in my penance, my mission. It is all I have let myself know for lifetimes.”

_Well I’ve been afraid of changing ‘cause I’ve built my life around you._

Closing his eyes, Dean recalls Jo’s shoulders against his in a too-small booth seat, Ellen’s hands around his own in the Winchesters’ kitchen. He shifts his grip, holds tighter. Cas squeezes back.

“I have not ceased in fulfilling the deeds that have been asked of me, if they were in my Father’s will to fulfill,” continues Cas. “But I never feel that I have done enough.”

_But time makes you bolder, even children get older._

“Cas…” croaks Dean, somehow feeling raw and exposed without having said a word.

Cas hums in response. Dean readjusts his grip until he’s almost crushing Cas to his chest, his arm pressed across Cas’ back. The wings of Cas’ shoulder blades flex around his forearm and Cas fists his hands in Dean’s shirt once more, arms wrapped as tight as a drowning man’s.

_And I’m getting older too._

Dean thinks of years of roving in the Impala, hours of aimless mechanic work and cup after cup of coffee drunk down at gas stations, the empty apartments, the roads with no destinations. He thinks of Mary’s tears when he came back and he thinks of his kid brother, sleeping soundly with his wife in their childhood home.

He thinks of Cas as he’d seen him for the first time, heralded by the ringing of an old brass bell above the front door.

“I never meant to return here, but I…I kept coming back, to where you are,” Cas admits, his voice muffled by Dean’s shirt collar where his face is pressed against it. “I don’t know why.

“Dean, of all the places on Earth, yours is the first one I feel confident in calling…home.”

_Oh, take my love, take it down._

Dean huffs and, before he can really think about it, turns to press a kiss into Cas’ hair.

“That’s what it’s supposed to feel like, Cas. That feeling...that means you belong here.”

 _With me_ , Dean thinks. _Stay here with me._

Cas draws himself back just far enough to make eye contact, searching, as if he had heard, but whatever he sees, he nevertheless leans in and touches his forehead to Dean’s. They line up together nearly nose to nose.

“Yes,” Cas breathes into the space between them, and Dean just knows exactly what he means this time.

Their lips are too close to go without kissing.

So they do.

The kiss is sweet, a chaste touch more than anything else. It’s snowing outside, and it’s past midnight by now, but they’re in no rush. There’s no hurry.

_And if you see my reflection in the snow-covered hills, well the landslide will bring it down._

They kiss again.

“Merry Christmas, Dean,” Cas murmurs. Dean sighs and runs his hands up into Cas’ hair to bring him closer yet, catching him in an honest embrace.

“Welcome home, Cas,” he says, and perhaps nothing has ever felt more fitting to say than that. Cas seems to agree since Dean can feel him smiling in their next kiss.

_Well, the landslide will bring it down._

Behind them, the record runs on and two mugs of tea remain steaming on the table.

They’ve spent their lives making it this far, both of them traveling here, in their own ways, to an old building now called The Highway Café just abreast of the off-ramp for Exit 25.

They can afford to take the time to find the road forward from it together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dean's choice of music was Ella Fitzgerald's Cry Me a River.
> 
> The final record chosen by Cas is, of course, Landslide by Fleetwood Mac.


End file.
